Mobile telecommunication networks have become ubiquitous. The general technical and commercial development has provided increased data transmission capabilities at lower costs, and consequently a variety of new applications—in addition to the original main application of mobile telephony—have become practicable. In particular, this includes Internet browsing, email services, and multimedia applications. As a non-limiting example, the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) has been introduced as an approach for delivering Internet Protocol (IP) multimedia and other Internet services to mobile users.
The pricing plans for transferring data over mobile telecommunication networks are currently mostly time based, with volume based subscriptions starting to appear. However, the inventor anticipates that mobile network operators are likely to introduce fee plans in which the charges not only depend on the transmission time or volume, but also on the type of data that is transmitted. The purpose of such fee plans may be to retain the present level of revenue for traditional, low data volume applications while at the same time making high data volume applications economically attractive for the users. As an example, the price per byte of video download or WAP surfing may be set significantly cheaper than the price per byte for transmitting text like, e.g., an SMS.